Link Performance of an ESPAR-Antenna Array in Rich Scattering and Clustered Channels

This paper aims at evaluating the link performance of an electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) in both rich scattering and clustered channels. Previous work has shown that the performance of an ESPAR-antenna can be comparable to a 2 × 2 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system in a rich scattering environment. The design of the antenna patterns used for transmission was based on intuition, and therefore cannot be guaranteed to be optimal. In this paper, we design the antenna patterns by minimizing the average inner-product between signals that are transmitted with different antenna patterns. We also evaluate the performance of the ESPAR-antenna at higher spectral-efficiencies than previous literature has done. The performance in terms of spectral-efficiency is evaluated for both rich scattering environments and clustered channels, whereas the performance in terms of symbol error rate is evaluated for rich scattering channels only.

R. BainsEmail: